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[Series] TMI #8 – Audrey Watters

I am so excited to be able to chat with Audrey Watters. Audrey writes (like 100 posts a day) at a leading tech blog ReadWriteWeb.com as well as HackEducation.com. Her posts on both blogs are often center around educational technology, and the interactions of tech and cultural trends and institutions, including this recent one on an app that librarians might be excited about. Be sure to check out her weekly Ed Tech Roundups to keep up with that world. I could go on a fanboy rant here and talk about how cool it was to meet Audrey (along with Seamus and Adrianne) here in NYC when I was interning with ReadWriteWeb, and how she was the first real life internet celebrity that I met, and how encouraging it was to chat with her about the state of education generally and some of my ideas (that may or may not have developed into this here bloggy blog!), and how I got super excited when she showed up on my favorite Digital Humanities podcast talking about ebooks… but I won’t. ;)

Listen on…

*We’re noticing a lack of comments on these shortcasts, and would like some feedback: Like/Dislike? Mix it in with writing?

9 thoughts on “[Series] TMI #8 – Audrey Watters”

Which reader do you use? I’ve noticed that it works in some and not in others. We might try to embed the media in a different way to make sure it works for others. Would you subscribe is these were podcasts through iTunes or something?

I wonder if this is a channel problem. I suspect that a lot of people view their RSS as solely a reading channel and embedded podcasts mean that they have to switch to a different consumption mode. Listening to podcasts in Reader (especially when they don’t have the “popout” function) means that I have to wait for the podcast to finish before I can go on to the next item and I prefer to go through my feeds as quickly as possible.

Emily succinctly described my use pattern as well. I skim in Reader and only pause to dig into articles if I’m grabbed by the content. A link to a podcast, even if it can be popped out, means dramatically switching gears and does not offer enough engaging text content to convince me it’s worth that.

That was a great interview! It reminded me of a prof that I had last semester who worked for a education software company. He was asked to fix a website, that basically sucked for the users. So instead, he wanted to make a site that would basically run itself, by allowing the users to use the website, sort of like a Wiki, and communicate with each other. He really wanted to make the site more like a community, BUT the software company didn’t like his idea because they wanted to make money off the users, not necessarily help them in the same way my prof wanted to.

Anyway, this talk reminded me about the shift in the way we use technology to communicate and share info. I like the idea of hacking education, of having more ownership and control of what we want.